Pages

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Do We Need Men Anymore?

Considering how
much time Grayson Perry has spent pondering masculinity, it’s disappointing how
little he seems to value or understand it.

An award-winning
artist, author, television presenter, and BBC Reith lecturer, the
London-based Perry is also a transvestite and, as he rather simply puts it, “a
man.” Not long ago he pursued a thoughtful if flawed exploration of masculinity
in a three-part BBC TV series called All
Man, and now has written a short, self-illustrated book on the subject
called The Descent of Man. The book poses
and attempts to answer the question that men of no other century have ever had
to ask: “What does it mean to be a male in the twenty-first century?”

Masculinity is the
source of a great deal of handwringing and finger-wagging in our
gender-confused time. It is viewed by many as resting somewhere on a scale
between problematic and abominable, and there is an increasing urgency to do something
about it. Grayson Perry, who considers himself very masculine, sees it as the
very source of all our troubles. “I sometimes watch the evening news on
television and think all of the world’s problems can be boiled down to one
thing: the behavior of people with a Y chromosome,” his book begins. “The
consequences of rogue masculinity are, I think, one of the biggest issues, if
not the biggest issue, facing the world today.”

He also views masculinity
as outdated. Here is his condescending message to his fellow men: “Look, I know
it’s been tough, and you have done a great job of dominating, defending and
providing with your big, strong male body, but things are changing.” We no
longer need men like Bear Grylls to teach us how to survive in the wild, he
says. In sum, “we don’t need lumbering, warmongering animal chasers anymore.”
Instead, the “true survival skills” of our time are “trying to find an
affordable flat to rent in London or sorting out a decent state school for
their children.”

Apart from the fact
that this is a stunningly narrow, first-world perspective on survival, is he
really suggesting that men have no purpose anymore as men beyond apartment-hunting or enrolling their kids in school
(which could just as easily be done by women)? Yes, he is, and it’s time, he declares,
for traditional masculinity and what he sees as its troubling components –
violence, the drive for success and status, the macho posturing – to be
dismantled and discarded. “The world is changing, and masculinity needs to
change too.”

How do we accomplish
this? “In order for equality to flourish, Default Man’s ideology has to be
unpicked from the fabric of society... so that we can more easily weave a just
world.” But plucking the “patriarchy” from society’s fabric like so much lint is
no mean feat. It requires perpetual activism. “Resistance needs to be woven
into every moment, every thought,
observation, and act.” [Emphasis added] Perry even claims, “I find myself
now questioning everything: Is that trash can sexist? Are traffic regulations
anti-woman?” This sounds like a silly, exhausting, unproductive, joyless way to
go through life, not to mention pathologically obsessive. And it won’t work.

Perry and I do
agree on a few points: boys need daily contact with and attention from positive
male role models, preferably their fathers; boys today also would benefit from some
kind of ritualized passage to manhood; soldiering and sports are effective ways
of “dealing with unsocialized masculine energy”; and “being single for a man is
not healthy, no matter what some mens’ rights groups like MGTOW [Men Going
Their Own Way] think.”

But beyond that, we
have different solutions. Perry’s position is the politically correct, utopian fantasy
that if we can just acculturate men to be more like women, peace and harmony and
equality will reign. This is a denial of human nature and an ass-backward way
to go about managing what Perry calls “rogue” masculinity.

Discussions about
manhood today are dominated by a loud minority of voices such as Perry’s, who label
it “toxic” and call for its fundamental transformation, if not its extermination.
Lost in all their noisy condemnation is any recognition for the good that men
do, for the positive aspects of masculinity, for the flip sides of some of the
very qualities Perry derides. Violence, for example, is necessary and righteous
when employed in defense of self, family and country (presumably Perry would
disagree, since in his book he dismisses the police and armed forces as
“legitimized violent gangs”). The male drive to compete, as another example, is
beneficial when it leads to self-actualization, innovation, and prosperity.

It’s long past time
that we stopped allowing the voices of anti-masculinity to sway the discussion.
There is plenty to celebrate and to value in traditional masculinity. Instead
of eliminating it altogether, we should be channeling it in productive,
virtuous directions. We need to shift the conversation from the “descent of
man” to the “ascent of man” – building up the best in masculine nature, not demolishing
the whole structure.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.